MBA622: Healthcare Challenges and Technological Advancements Report

This report examines the impact of medical and technological advancements on contemporary healthcare, focusing on the challenges faced by healthcare leaders. It highlights the increasing life expectancy due to improvements in healthcare services and medical research, while also acknowledging the rise in chronic ailments and the strain on primary healthcare services. The report identifies the shortage of healthcare professionals, financial resource allocation issues, and the proposed use of mobile health technologies as key issues. It delves into the challenges associated with these technologies, including data security, investment costs, and resistance to change from healthcare professionals. The report explores stakeholder perspectives, including those of healthcare professionals, higher healthcare authorities, IT departments, and patients, and analyzes the challenges and opportunities presented by the rapidly changing technological environment. Ethical responsibilities such as confidentiality, informed consent, honesty, and quality are discussed. The report concludes with recommendations for strategic responses, emphasizing the need for funding, leadership, communication, and training to address these challenges and leverage the benefits of technological advancements in healthcare.

Medical and technological advancements in
present day healthcare: challenges for
healthcare leaders

Overview:
• advancement of medicine and technology had helped in increasing the life
expectancy of people
• because of the result of significant improvement in the healthcare services
as well as investment in medical researchers
• However, the quality of life led by the people is poor as they are seen to
suffer from huge number of chronic ailments (Nelson and Straggers 2016)
• number of patients requiring care services from the healthcare sector had
increased massively
• created an intense pressure on the primary healthcare services

Issue
•United States is facing a massive shortage of healthcare professionals
•handling huge inflow of patients had become difficult for the different
healthcare organizations as human resources have become restricted
•huge allocation of funds and resources are also found to be necessary
to tackle demands and care needs (Silva et al. 2015)
•to find a proper alternative that can help every healthcare organization
to overcome such crisis, healthcare leaders have proposed the
utilization of mobile health technologies
•to overcome the mentioned crisis, leaders proposed the use of mobile
healthcare technologies like that of tele-health, tele-medicines, video-
conferencing and many others
•it is associated with many issues

Issue: challenges identified
• data security issues and data protection issues
• Loss of confidentiality
• huge investment and allocation of funds required for implementation of
the project
• not all the working members of the healthcare organizations may feel
comfortable with the changes and might try to rebel against them (Kazdin
et al. 2018)
• allocating training sessions require expenditure of resources and wastage
of practice times of professionals in the busy working schedules of the
hospitals

Stakeholder groups and their perspectives on the issue: working healthcare professionals.
• they might not feel comfortable
• may not have the expertise required for caring patients through monitors,
mobile applications, emails and similar others methods (Islam et al. 2015)
• require specialized training and dedication to which such professionals
might not be ready to contribute to the recent advancement

Stakeholder groups
higher healthcare authorities:
• The main concern for the higher authorities would be the huge amount of
healthcare resources and funding
• Arranging for training sessions of the healthcare professionals, recruiting
trainers for them, allocating places for the training workshops are some of
the areas where healthcare authorities might face issues (Sneha and
straub 2017)
• huge amount of resources for development of an expert IT teams for
managing the e-health services
• Allocations of funds for purchasing the machines, developing new
departments and rooms, setting procedures of the technological services

Stakeholder groups:
IT department:
• already remain booked with the huge amount of responsibilities of
managing the machines, equipments, technological activities, data
protection of the patients and the healthcare organizations and many
others
• Implementation of e-health services would add to their efforts resulting in
the increase of their work burden (Krann et al. 2015)
• additional research work on the new project for which recruitment of new
members might be required for sharing the burden

Stakeholder groups:
Patients:
• patients who do not have health literacy or those who do not have skills
and knowledge might not feel comfortable with this mode of treatment
process
• they might not want to get treatment in e-health procedures (Dzau et al.
2017)

Challenges and opportunities presented by the environmental factor:
• rapid change would require the leaders in acquiring and developing
methods so that different private sessions and the data of patients can be
effectively maintained and accessed
• the rapidly advancing technology would require allocation of huge funds
for research for continuous betterment and removal of technological
glitches (Sligo et al. 2017)
• introduction of the system in to the main healthcare framework services
in the organizations would also require huge outflow of funds

Challenges:
• including the cyberworld in the healthcare system and ensuring legal
requirements for strict maintenance of privacy and security of the patients
requires effective planning and efficiency of experts
• a dedicated IT department and research teams should also be brought
into the system that would not only be expert in their skills but would also
understand and predict the behaviors of the systems (Kim et al. 2016)
• change of working style might affect the morale and confidence of the
present employees, resentment for the system

Benefits:
• help in controlling and reducing the office visits of patients
• help in saving huge amount of healthcare resources and would prevent
allocation of healthcare professionals apart from the main doctor
• Professionals required for management of patients, providing them
appointment, cash collection, and many others would not be required
(Laurenza et al. 2018)
• help in mitigating the issues of healthcare professional shortage
• help in controlling the huge expenditure of healthcare resources in the
present times

Ethical responsibilities: confidentiality, privacy, security
• ensure privacy and confidentiality as well as security of the data, acquired
through the technological aspect while communicating with the patients,
remains high chance of data theft by dishonest people (Scantlebury et al.
2017)
• healthcare professionals have an additional duty to maintain their
confidentiality and privacy by not leaking the information and preserving
the information through proper data protection procedures with the help
of IT departments